Typically, soft drinks or the like served in fast food establishments and in many other places utilize plastic lids for preventing the contents of such container from spilling. Such lid normally has an opening therein for reception of a straw therethrough. One of the problems with this very common product, from the point of view of the vendor of such soft drinks or the like, is that quite often the customers take more than one straw per drink and this results in a great additional expense to the vendor. Even when the customer leaves such extra straws behind, they cannot be reused because of the danger that they would not be clean and sanitary once handled by the customers.
Consequently there is a need for an apparatus or method for preventing the aforementioned type of waste in order to control the amount and number of straws utilized by soft drink customers.